"The memory of the senses, a nontransparent and differentially available body of information, is important to everybody as a source of individual knowledge."
Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film, p.199
what it felt like to dream fire is the first piece of artistic research on the (in)visibilities, (in)tangibility and (un)representability of traumatic memory as part of my PhD. In a series of three short films, I explore what the embodied knowledge of a traumatic experience feels like, and it is – as Lindner suggests, those ‘unruly, sticky, numbing, exhilarating, frustrating, agitating and affirming resonances’ that emerge in the encounters between bodies, film and theory which I seek out.
The memory recorded in the body after an incisive, traumatic experience can be shattering. The narrative, conscious part of the brain is often too overwhelmed to process the experience. Instead, the knowledge of what happened manifests itself in the body: through hallucinations, dreams, fictionalised accounts and physical reactions such as anxiety, overwhelm, nausea or pain. Anne Rutherford draws our attention to the rupturing nature of trauma as it takes away the 'fundamental existential ground of existence in one’s body'.
How can we articulate this kind of bodily knowledge? How can the fragmentation of experience and the altered perception of identity be a source of knowledge in itself?
In what it felt like to dream fire, I turn the gaze of the camera on myself and explore a specific traumatic experience that confronted me with the possibility of loss of a close person. It changed my unperturped view on life from one day to the next. Retracing the traumatic memory of this experience through disrupted filmic temporalities and spatialities, I’m interested in how film can be a space of bodily and political negotiation; a space that pushes and rearranges my agency as an artist and researcher.
All three films have long-exposure photographs as a basis and play with a red colour theme, motion and the materiality of the image in different ways: what it felt like to dream fire I is a slow progression of subtly animated stills, while what it felt like to dream fire II creates stop-motion sequences out of long-exposure photographs. what it felt like to dream fire III uses projections within the film and alienates filmic temporality through slow-motion movement that is sped up in the editing. Variations in the films' exhibitions posed opportunities to trace particular sensations of my traumatic experience.
what it felt like to dream fire drives my larger inquiry into trauma and experimental documentary filmmaking. I aim to (re)locate knowledge that is in the body through an expanded co-creative filmmaking method, which allows for a collaborative, non-hierarchical documentary space to take shape. I basically use film to study what traumatic memory feels like in someone’s body, but also what it feels like to encounter it in film. I study this not to find definitive representations and clear-cut explanations for traumatic memory, but precisely to communicate and give space for the complicatedness, for the frictions and entanglements of traumatic memory in our bodies.
